GOOD COUNCILLORS WILL SERVE AS CONSTRUCTIVE OPPOSITION

GOOD WILL NOT ENTER ANY COALITION GOVERNMENTS

GOOD’s leadership has decided that we will not enter any local government coalitions.

GOOD was registered as a political party less than 3 years ago. With just three months to campaign in 2019 elections we managed to secure 2 seats in the National Assembly and 1 seat in the Western Cape Legislature.

During 2019 and 2020 we contested 13 by-elections demonstrating consistent electoral growth in each ward we contested. We won our first ward in November 2020 in George.

In last week’s local government elections we contested 45 municipalities, in 5 provinces, and we are celebrating the results which show that our electoral growth has continued.

We presented a comprehensive and realistic plan to fix our towns and cities and the voters responded to that plan by electing 45 GOOD councillors in municipalities across 4 provinces. This includes 12 municipalities where no political party achieved an outright majority and where coalitions are needed in order to form a government.

Our National Management Committee (“NMC”) has considered several approaches to form coalitions with other political parties in these municipalities. We have concluded that the best way to serve our supporters, and all the residents in these towns and cities, would be as a constructive opposition.

In order to ensure that our Councillors properly represent our electoral mandate, based on our comprehensive plan to fix our towns and cities, we have:

• Established a Local Government Desk to support our councillors in the performance of their duties to the residents and voters they were elected to serve;
• Prepared a comprehensive training programme on local government legislation that all our councillors will go through;
• Developed a performance management system to ensure that our councillors are effectively representing our voters and our causes and to hold them accountable for a high level of performance;
• Implemented our party’s constitutional requirement that every councillor complete a Declaration of Interests to ensure that there are no conflicts of interest between their private interests and their public duties.

GOOD is one of a handful of newer political parties, arrogantly dismissed by some as non-entities, which combined to give both the ANC and the DA bloody noses in the local government elections – including in the City of Cape Town where the DA majority was slashed by 8%.

We have demonstrated that the support we received was not wasted and we will work hard and constructively to earn every single vote we received.

Our objective is to persuade more voters to support our fight for spatial, social, economic and environmental justice. We want to continue to grow and to continue to challenge the decaying old parties who have betrayed those they have been elected to serve.

Statement issued by Brett Herron, GOOD Secretary General, 7 November 2021